Monday, 17 April 2017

#Lebanon A float bearing a sculpture of Jesus is seen during a procession marking Holy Friday in Beirut. Photo @PatrickBaz: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

John Donne: Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.

Syrian #Christian girls attend mass at the Syriac church of the Holy Virgin in the city of Qamishli @Delilsouleman @AFPphoto: image via Frédérique
Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 April 2017#Syrian

#France A ceremony presents the Crown of Thorns - a relic of
the passion of Christ - to the faithful at the @notredameparis in Paris. Photo @philippe_lopez: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

#Bulgaria East-Orthodox believer prays in front of a wooden crucifix
during a Good Friday service at Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia.
Photo @dilkoff: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

#Greece Orthodox worshipper prays to and kisses to a wooden crucifix during a
Good Friday's Apokathelosis at Pendeli monastery near Athens. Photo @lgouliam: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

#Kosovo An Orthodox believer takes part in midnight Easter Service at
the Gracanica medieval monastery in the town of Gracanica.
@armend_nimani: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 April 2017

#Iraq An Iraqi Christian woman holds a rosary as she attends a Good Friday
mass at the church of Mart Shmoni in Arbil. Photo @safinphoto: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

#Kosovo An Orthodox Christian nun arrives for an Easter service at the
Gracanica medieval monastery in the town of Gracanica. Photo
@armend_nimani: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

#Belarus Worshippers attend the midnight Easter service in the village of Krevo. Photo @sergeygapon: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 April 2017

#Greece Fireworks explode over the Temple of Appolon in Ancient Corinth
during the traditional celebrations of the Orthodox Easter. Photo Valerie Gache: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 April 2017

#Iraq A member of the Iraqi security forces stands guard as Christians attend
an Easter mass at the Mar Shimoni church in Bartalla. Photo @safinphoto: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

#Iraq A Syriac Christian militiaman stands guard on top of a building during
an easter ceremony at Saint John's church in Qaraqosh. Photo @tofsimon: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 April 2017

#Iraq Displaced Iraqi men arrive at a processing center in western Mosul
before they are transported to refugee camps. Photo @tofsimon #AFP:
image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 14 April 2017

SYRIA - Smoke billows following a reported air strike on a rebel-held
area in the southern Syrian city of Daraa. Photo @AbazidMohamad:
image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 April 2017

#IraqIraqi
forces preparing as they advance in Mosul during an offensive to
recapture the city from IS group fighters. Photo Ahmad Al-Rubaye:
image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 April 2017

#India A youth jumps into the water of a decorative pool adorning the gardens
surrounding the India Gate monument in New Delhi. @PrakashAFP: image via Frédérique Geffard
@fgeffardAFP, 15 April 2017

"Donald Trump has got a lot to answer for" -- a righteously pissed off Berkeley citizen and lifelong pacifist, considering the events of Easter Weekend, 15 April 2017

Easter Sunday in Berkeley: photo via Anti-Fascist News, 16 April 2017

The white supremacist's name is Nathan Damigo.
And yes that is assault and he should be arrested and sent to jail: image via Mikel Jollett @Mikel_Jollett, 15 April 2017

Mikel JollettVerified account@Mikel_Jollett

A white supremacist sucker-punching a woman in the street today is the embodiment of Donald Trump's America.Stephen Miller Retweeted Mikel Jollett

Stephen Miller added,We warned you about where laughing and celebrating about punching people in the street would go.

image via Stephen Miller@redsteeze, 16 April 2017

Citizens Fed Up Replying to @CitizensFedUp: The still pic: image via Citizens Fed Up @CitizensFedUp, 16 April 2017

The
Obamas spent every Easter attending church service. Trump hasn't
attended church once since his inauguration. Where's the GOP outrage?:
image via Matt McDermott @mattmfm, 16 April 2017

The
Obamas spent every Easter attending church service. Trump hasn't
attended church once since his inauguration. Where's the GOP outrage?:
image via Matt McDermott @mattmfm, 16 April 2017

So nuts to see Trump supporters of color next to guys sieg heiling.: image via Shane Bauer Verified account @shane_bauer, 15 April 2017

This guy just went "on the record" to say "black people are inferior to whites, genetically". #PatriotsDay #Berkeley: image via Shane Bauer Verified account @shane_bauer, 15 April 2017

Identity Evropa founder and white nationalist Nathan Damigo attacks a woman in the crowd at Berkeley on Sunday: photo by Anti-Fascist News, 16 April 2017

"Identity
Evropa" founder and Cal State Stanislaus student Nathan Damigo, left,
and Fela Uhuru listen as students ask questions during Uhuru's Intro to
Ethnic Studies class. Damigo, a former Marine corporal and the founder of a white nationalist
organization, is an increasingly sought-after voice in the so-called
alt-right movement.: photo by Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times, 6 December 2016

In diverse California, a young white supremacist seeks to convert fellow college students: A voice from the alt-right at Cal State Stanislaus: Hailey Branson-Potts, Los Angeles Times, 6 December 2017

Nathan Damigo brought his message of white separatism
to an unusual place: an ethnic studies class at Cal State Stanislaus
called Searching for America.

Speaking to a crowd filled
with black and Latino students, he wove a country song tale of
whites becoming an endangered minority in America and compared their
plight to Native Americans — before describing his fantasy for a utopian
homeland for whites not unlike Indian reservations.

“Even though horrible things did happen to the indigenous
people … there was land set aside where they could be who they were and
express themselves how they wanted to, and they could have a form of
government that reflected them,” Damigo said. “And I think that is
something that we want.”

The comparison elicited aghast
stares from the crowd late last month. It was a reminder that Damigo, a
30-year-old Cal State Stanislaus student, was far froma gathering one recent weekend in Washington with like-minded white men, some of whom stretched out their arms in Nazi salutes.

Damigo, a former Marine corporal and the
founder of a white nationalist organization, is part of the so-called
alt-right movement. Some experts who study extremism say he is
emblematic of the young, web-savvy racists who are trying to
intellectualize and mainstream bigotry. Damigo and others like him have
set their sights in particular on college campuses, eager to take on
hostile audience in hopes of getting their message across.

In the ethnic studies class, Damigo told
students that immigration and diversity were destroying the country and
that no place heralded the decline of whites' fortunes in America like
his home state of California.

“California was never
white,” Jonathan Grammatico, a white 25-year-old social work student,
shot back at Damigo at one point. “It belonged to indigenous people and
then to Mexicans.”

Damigo’s address came courtesy of
Fela Uhuru, an ethnic studies instructor who identifies as Asian, black
and Native American and has the African continent tattooed on his arm.
He said he wanted his students to have a frank dialogue about race and
identity with someone whose presence on campus has stirred controversy.

Damigo has been on an emotional high since Donald Trump won the presidency. The
day after the billionaire’s victory, Damigo propped his cellphone up in
his car, turned on the Periscope live-streaming app and started
talking.

“We as the alt-right are the reason why Trump
won,” he said, laughing. He then held up a bullhorn and described how,
as he drove home from celebrating with friends in Folsom, he had shouted
at people who were presumably not white: “You have to go back!”

The
loosely defined alt-right,
a white nationalist movement, has been emboldened by Trump and his
rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims, his sharing of white supremacists’
tweets and his appointment of Stephen K. Bannon — the outgoing executive
chairman of Breitbart News, a purveyor of alt-right ideology — as his
chief strategist.

Despite
California’s contemporary liberal politics and celebrated diversity,
California has a well-established history of racism and racially
polarizing efforts.

For decades, the Golden State has been home to the
largest racist skinhead population in the country, primarily
concentrated in diverse Southern California, according to the
Anti-Defamation League. The state’s history books are filled with cruel
treatment of ethnic minority groups, ranging from the internment of
Japanese Americans during World War II to exploitative treatment of
laborers from Latin America and elsewhere. Just two decades ago,
California voters approved a proposition that would have stripped people
in the country illegally of many public benefits.

California
today is considered one of the most liberal and diverse states in the
union, adopting strong protections and services for those here
illegally.

Still, earlier this year, a Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim and a neo-Nazi event outside the state Capitol
erupted in violence. Bakersfield last year was the site of Camp
Comradery, a national gathering that featured a unique collaboration
between so-called “intellectual racists” and racist skinheads, said
Joanna Mendelson, an investigative researcher with the California branch
of the Anti-Defamation League.

“Often,
in areas that have undergone enormous demographic shifts, some of these
racist and bigoted voices emerge as people feel threatened,” Mendelson
said. “They feel that they are fighting against a rising tide of color
that’s threatening their future existence.”In a periscope video the week of Trump’s election, Damigo fantasized about “Calexit,” the proposed secession of California.

“The
remaining few of us who are white would white-flight ourselves out of
here and join you guys in the rest of the country, and we could do our
own thing and California could just pretty much devolve into
cannibalism,” he said, snickering.

He mentioned his hometown of San Jose, which, he said, looked much different than when his grandparents moved there decades ago.

“The state has just radically changed,” Damigo said. “If you’re white and you live here, it’s like being in a foreign country.”

He
grew up in the Silicon Valley and attended a private Baptist school
that, he said, was racially diverse. He never had any bad experiences
with his nonwhite classmates.

Still, he said, even as a
child he believed there were “double standards” about race and who was
allowed to talk about and celebrate it. He’d go to his Filipino friends’
birthday parties, only to long for the kind of shared culture they had.

Damigo
joined the Marines in 2004, at age 18, and did two tours in Iraq.
There, he said, he saw firsthand the conflicts between the country’s
ethnic and religious groups.

“I said, ‘This is dumb. Why
don’t … each one of them have their own country and they can all
express themselves and ... they’re not, you know, fighting with each
other,” he said.

Damigo lost a few friends to the
war, and came back in bad shape. After his first tour, he tried to
commit suicide, but a friend intervened, according to San Diego County
court records.

In November 2007, he had been home for a
month after his second tour of duty and was suffering from severe
post-traumatic stress disorder, drug and alcohol abuse, paranoia and
flashbacks, court records show. A few days after the anniversary of a
friend’s combat death, he spent a night drinking and went for a walk
with a gun he’d gotten two days before as a gift. He came across a La
Mesa cab driver who he thought was Iraqi, put a gun to his head and
robbed the man of $43, records show.

He was convicted of armed robbery and spent a year in county jail and four years in prison for the crime.

Damigo said he was embarrassed and guilt-ridden by the robbery. Still, he considers the time alone in prison a gift of sorts.

“Because
you have nothing but time to think in prison, that’s when I finally
started looking at the more intellectual roots and started researching
books and literature on race and identity," he said.

He
was greatly influenced, he said, by “My Awakening,” the book by former
Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and by racial provocateurs J. Philippe
Rushton and Nicholas Wade.

He came out of prison with a
belief that there is a genetic basis for certain behaviors and
intellect, distinguished by race — that a black person is more likely
than a white person to be less intelligent and more violent, for
example.

Such ideas have been roundly denounced by biologists and geneticists as unscientific. And racist.

For some time after prison, Damigo led the now-defunct National Youth Front,
the youth wing of the nationalist American Freedom Party, which the
Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an organization founded by
“racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and
return the United States to white rule.”

In March,
Damigo founded Identity Evropa, which bills itself as a “generation of
awakened Europeans” who “oppose those who would defame our history and
rich cultural heritage.” Among the application questions for Identity
Evropa is whether applicants are “of European, non-Semitic heritage.”

The
group posts fliers around college campuses nationwide with slogans like
“Let’s Become Great Again” and “Protect Your Heritage.”

In
October, after Identity Evropa’s material began appearing on California
campuses, someone posted fliers on Cal State Stanislaus’ campus with
Damigo’s face and a warning that he was a “known white supremacist and
violent offender.”

The
university’s president, Ellen Junn, said in a statement at the time
that while safety was her top priority, she believed in the freedom of
speech on campus, even if it was offensive.

Brian
Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at
Cal State San Bernardino, said Identity Evropa’s description reads like
“a template that exists within the alt-right.”

“A lot of
these young guys dig these Western civilization ramblings and attempt to
intellectualize bigotry,”

Levin said. “It tries to put a
pseudo-intellectual veneer that revolves around identity and history and
the notion that the accomplishments of Western civilization are under
attack by our increasingly diverse and multicultural society.”

“These
guys are like vape shops — they’re starting to spring up everywhere,
and there’s nothing particularly new or creative about it.”

While
such groups try to distance themselves from groups like the KKK and
neo-Nazis, the first sign Levin saw at this year’s Klan rally in Anaheim
said, “Stop white cultural genocide.”

Standing
5-foot-5, Damigo wears the same haircut — long on top, with shaved sides
— favored by members of the alt-right. Last year, he got a DNA test as
an “affirmation” of his whiteness.

On Twitter, where he uses the name “Fashy Haircut” (as in fascist), he regularly posts photos in front of his bookcase,
which includes titles by the likes of Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly,
books about genetics, race and evolution — and books from the “Twilight”
vampire series.

In person, Damigo’s language is more
circumspect than it is in the digital realm, frustrating students in the
ethnic studies class.Uhuru, the instructor, asked him about the fliers on campus that characterized him as a white supremacist.

“Language
like, you know, ‘racist,’ ‘supremacist,’ many of those words have
become so horribly loaded that oftentimes they’ve gotten to the point
where I personally will consider some of that language, if they’re used
in a sense of moralizing a situation and used to obfuscate from an
actual empirical argument, I would actually see that as antiwhite hate
speech,” he said.

His answers to the students’ questions
about his views were long-winded and complex. He said called himself an
“identitarian,” not a white supremacist.

One
frustrated student replied, “You saying you’re an identitarian is the
same thing as just saying, ‘I’m a politician.’ That doesn’t tell you
where your values lie.… you’re masking what you’re actually standing
for.”

Asked by a student about his arrest, he lowered his
voice: “I want you guys to know that you are safe here, that I do not
have any animosity toward any of you here.”

But a few
days later, he took to Twitter and said minority children born in the
U.S. “inherit third world behavior” and that refugees should “go home.”

“Everything
that has happened since @realDonaldTrump was declared the future
president shows that we are engaged in total war,” he tweeted. Trump, he
wrote, “was the only candidate whose policies would make America
Whiter.”